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We’re in overtime now. Extra innings. And while additional time tacked onto a game in football, basketball or baseball often brings tension, elevated blood pressure and even a sense of dread—think “sudden death”—the extra innings we receive each September are cause for gratitude: Summer isn’t really over.
Labor Day, the symbolic end of summer, has come and gone. Yet the annual gift—the weeks until calendar summer vanishes, the weeks that are like an extra scoop or three of ice cream presented to you just when you thought it was time to put on a coat and head for the door—has arrived. Unlike in sports, where overtime is a once-in-a-while anomaly, the benefaction of summer’s yearly overtime is as dependable as sunrise.
This week we are in the beginning breaths of optimal overtime, because the first Monday in September, the federal definition of Labor Day, fell on Sept. 1. This means that we’ve been given three entire weeks of extra summer, three weeks until the autumnal equinox on Sept. 22. A Sept. 7 Labor Day can make you feel as if you’ve been robbed, but a Sept. 1 Labor Day can—and should—make you feel like you’ve won an invisible lottery.
Because you have. Summer remains. “All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray” are just words from an old song. In September’s summer overtime all the leaves are green and the sky is blue. At least it feels that way. Something worth singing about.
In the central Ohio town where I grew up, the epicenter of summer overtime was Johnson’s Real Ice Cream on Main Street, where people continued to gather even after school had started and the local swimming pools had been drained for the year. Johnson’s was proof that no one could declare summer was over until we were good and ready to concede it was over.
There was a little screen window in the front of the store, where you could line up outside for September ice-cream cones and devour them beneath the sun. In the back of the building was the “factory,” as everyone called it (though it was really just a large room), where Bob Johnson and his son-in-law, Jim Wilcoxon, had been handcrafting dozens of ice cream flavors since the day they opened for business on Sept. 1, 1950. Summer, over? In early September?
Not a chance. There were still days and days to go. Look at the calendar.
This week Johnson’s commemorates its 75th anniversary of affirming beyond reasonable doubt that summer sustains in September. Ice-cream eating contests, a band in the parking lot, a dunk tank where the mayor will get soaked time and time again. Extra innings in America—every summer’s priceless parting wink.
Mr. Greene’s books include the novel “All Summer Long.”
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